“A good garden may have some weeds” ~ Thomas Fuller

Well, if that’s true then I have a freaking AMAZING garden.

A little over two years ago we had the foundation on our house repaired. If you’ve ever been through this you know that they rip out everything surrounding your house and that they generally suck in putting things back where they found them. At the time, we weren’t particularly concerned about this because we didn’t like what was there in the first place. However, now we’re here, two years later, and it still looks like the foundation guys left yesterday… except for the weeds. You’ve got to admire the resilience of weeds. Those suckers will grow anywhere. We’ve even got one or two growing in OUR GUTTERS! How crazy is that? Anyways my main concern today wasn’t actually about the weeds. It was, instead, about a horrible safety danger to my kid. That’s right, I have a kid. Now, she may not be the biological came-from-my-womb kind of kid, but she’s my baby just the same. She turns 8 in a few days, is about 2 feet tall and blond with brown eyes. Her name is Lita and she’s the apple of my eye. That’s right kids, she’s a Labrador. Because we don’t have any grass to speak of in our back yard it means that Lita has to do her business in the front yard. The other day when letting her out I noticed her hippity-hopping around in the bed that surrounds a holly tree. The grass from the lawn is actually starting to grow in the bed and Lita can no longer differentiate where the lawn ends and the flowerbed begins. This, however, was again, not my main concern. What bothered me was the fact that the edging surrounding the tree-bed is metal and has completely rotted through. There are rough edges sticking up and I can just see in my minds eye my baby girl stepping on one. Unfortunately she wasn’t blessed with good genetics. The hubs and I are about as clumsy as it gets and the apple did not fall far from that tree. So it was off to Home Depot in search of new edging… and a lot of mulch.

I have to admit I’m pretty proud of the hubs and myself. We managed to completely weed the bed, turn the soil, remove the old edging, put down new edging, add fertilizer and mulch all in the span of about two and a half hours. We rock. Now I don’t have to worry about any unplanned trips to the ER related to the rotted metal edging. As for unplanned trips to the ER in general, yeah well, we’re just not that lucky. Genetics baby, genetics.

Want to know how many weeds came out of that bed? We filled an entire fifty-gallon trashcan. Crazy huh? So now at least we have one semi-attractive place in our garden. As for the rest of it? I’m liking concrete more and more.